it is true what you say about the one way street, which is really a dilemma. It still seems really awkward to me if people are really, truly monolingual, because this is not an option one has in my daily context and I really think that monolingualism is very limiting. On the other hand, although I am always trying to be really critical, I have to say that English also gives me a lot of opportunities and there are many friends who wouldn’t be friends (including many non-native English speakers) if it wasn’t for English. In this way, English is limiting and opening at the same time…

I recently watched this movie on Esperanto with my students http://esperantodocumentary.com/en/about-the-film and in this context, although it all seems very utopian, I really liked it for its idealism. Maybe we should try to make English a bit more like Esperanto in emphasising its democratic and inclusive functions? I really don’t know…

Does the focus on the territorial spread of English make invisible the discourses – based on neoliberal capitalism, colonialism, cultural industries, consumerism – that are responsible for its spread? Does the focus on territorial concepts like ‘global’ and ‘local’ thus enforce the hegemonic, neutralised status of English?

As an American who’s pretty much spent his whole life swimming against the linguistic stream — trying valiantly to acquire fluency in German while swimming against the tide of English globally, in the U.S., and, even in Germany itself — I can say that I dream of having easy/multiple and everyday opportunities to be multilingual in German and English in the U.S., as well as seeing such opportunities for my two daughters, whom we are raising as German-English bilinguals, even though German is a second language for me, and my wife is English monolingual. However, I know this is just a fantasy, and it will never happen. English is indeed virtually everywhere, at least in “global” urban centers, and especially in “cosmopolitan” places such as Berlin, Germany, but sadly it’s very much a one-way street/one-way flow, at least in relation to the U.S. & Germany.